The Barney Cleaver Detective Agency

Scripture:  I Corinthians 13:12-13 - For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then, face to face. Now, I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Deep within us is an itching, prompting such a scratch and twitching. There's a balm for  how we're prone. T'is love, I say, yes, love alone.

Throughout His earthly walk, we see of Jesus, love alive, and this stuff of His would forgive the fallen, heal the lame, give sight to the blind, attract children, and even raise the dead. This love would confront the proud, comfort the despairing, and set the captives free. And those who were slated for eternal dying, would find in Him, eternal life.
The bible gives us many examples of how love can meet our most basic need, how it is the ultimate game changer, and we see how it's absence can take us down, sometimes quietly and with pleasant subtlety, and sometimes explosively.
Changelings unto love would include the learned and the unlearned, the rich and the poor, the religious and the heathen, men and women, the young and the seniorly... it would include traitors and zealots, crooks and centurions, seekers and malcontents, at-home mothers and harlots, poets and brawlers, students and teachers, and even fishermen and tax collectors.  In Christ, there was no human hue nor height nor personal history so removed from the reach of grace, as to be untouchable. Love is quite the elevator, but sometimes we folks choose to go down.

None, I suppose, could've figured on the eighteen hours of hellish turning this particular community had coming. When it was told that a black teenager stumbled upon a white elevator attendant, Sarah Page, things escalated fast, especially as the local media turned an accident into an assault. Dick Rowland was the teenager who had to be kept by the sheriff, for his own safety, with deputy sheriff Barney Cleaver. As the murmuring heightened a cadre of armed black Tulsans including World War I veterans showed up to protect Rowland, followed by a confrontational mob of white men of much greater numbers. A gun was fired.
The community was Greenwood, known by some [due to it's prosperity] as 'Black Wall Street', and by some others as 'Little Africa'. The time was May 31, 1921, and the place, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Cleaver, a black man, had the distinction of owning and opening the first black-owned detective agency in the country, and now he was front and center in another bit of lamentable American history, where mob rule practically levelled this successful black community, and for the many deaths and injuries and losses of homes and businesses, 'riot' was, to many, an understatement. The more corrected label can be understood by 'the Tulsa Race Massacre'; 100-300 estimated deaths, mostly black, 8,000 homeless of a 10,000 person census, and 1,256 houses burned, more looted... greater than the equivalent of 35 city blocks in ruins. The survivorship included both Rowland and Cleaver [Rowland was acquitted of the charges]. The Barney Cleaver Detective Agency however did not survive the riots, and of that devastation the one surviving edifice was that of the partially damaged Mt. Vernon AME Church, still active, listed now as well as an historic site.
No one was convicted, and no losses were repaid. Interestingly, the event never made the greater news then, nor the history books for quite a while. Insurance companies still resist covering the losses.

Our presidents during the 1921 year were outgoing Woodrow Wilson [Democrat], and incoming Warren G. Harding [Republican].
For balanced understanding Oklahoma [translated Red People] is home to many of the displaced Native Americans from the South-Atlantic states, by way of the 'Trail of Tears', a generation beforehand.

No matter what color, ethnicity, philosophical bent, economic class, cultural leaning, political choice or religion an offender identifies with, lawlessness is not of God, and the logical outcome of it is chaos when love is allowed to be absent, incomplete, or distorted... and should love be indifferent, then there can be no true flourishing... it was true for Jesus' day, it was true in Oklahoma 100 years ago, and it is true even now.
Maranatha!

"Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil, does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never fails” (1st Corinthians 13 @ 4-8a).


Prayer:  Heavenly Father, please lead us to be more loving, I pray, in the name of Your Son,and our Savior, Jesus Christ. Bring Your healing Lord, and use me.  Amen.

(by Dr. McNeal Brockington)